Train of Hope

“I called Julian, a friend of mine, and he was just posting on facebook: Some refugees are coming to the central station, there’s no one around. I’m here with some friends. I think they could need some help.” Martina Barwitzki, Train of Hope

You sense the Train of Hope camp even before you see it. Exiting the underground into the train station, gliding up several escalators to reach the main ticketing hall, you feel something in the air. Your senses become more alert, a prickle up your spine, your eyes scanning for this terrifying wave of refugees you’ve only read and heard about on the news and in social media for months. My first time was around 8pm at night. A friend had been there several times already, and had urged me to go. As my feet left the last escalator, I literally stepped right into the crisis. The ticketing hall was packed. Young, old, babies, toddlers. Neighbouring countries had opened their borders earlier in the day, and that night, as most of the city prepared to party or sleep, Vienna was in an emergency situation. Far from feeling fear, my immediate reaction was some version of “Oh my God.” There are people here who need help. Someone has to do it. It is the same feeling that draws every volunteer to Train of Hope, the feeling that keeps them coming back day after day, night after night.

The Viennese have become adept at using social media to launch a wide variety of street demonstrations. In 2009, a facebook campaign by two young students resulted in a 3000 person Lichterkette – a chain of light that encircled the parliament following the election of a far right youth group leader. Since the end of August this year, in the run-up to a particularly divisive fight for the Mayor’ seat between the sitting Socialist Michael Haupl and the head of the far right FPO, a small group of Viennese students, under the banner “Train of Hope”, have again used social media to react in very concrete ways to something altogether larger: a global refugee crisis that has paralysed professional politicians, overwhelmed seasoned journalists, and thrown citizens on every continent, already numbed from two decades of Middle East conflict, into a renewed spiral of fear and confusion.

Since the first trains arrived from Hungary at the end of August, a great number of the Viennese have chosen to face the wave head on and dive in. “It started with just ten people, and there were these big trains coming in!” Martina Barwitzki laughs. “It was just a group of people who tried to have bottles of water and cookies for them, in the main hall on the other side of the Hauptbahnhof station. Then the OeBB (the Austrian Railway) said “There’s even more coming, we don’t even have the space for you”, and they asked maybe you could go to the other side here, the smaller hall, just with our little tables, and then it started. It felt like we couldn’t do anything, because they are coming, it’s not under control, even more and more, and they are coming.”

From the first week of September, the Train of Hope’s encampment at the Hauptbahnhof, has become an essential service along an arduous route for refugees. Vienna is a city that has weathered many refugee challenges, each triggered by major global events: The Second World War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Balkan War, and more recently the rise of Isis and other extreme terror groups,. The combination of local fighting and external bombing campaigns has driven a huddled mass of exhausted, broke and hungry refugees into the peaceful territory of Europe, causing some panic amongst us all. While other border countries between East and West, such as Hungary, have chosen to hide behind a barbed wire fence and well-armed police, Austria has surprisingly become the most important and welcoming way station for refugees en route to a hopefully safe haven in

Germany.

From a single table in the main train station, run sporadically by a few friends making times to meet via facebook messages, the Train of Hope has since grown into a service for the city so essential that without it, Vienna’s current reputation as the only European city welcoming to refugees would be seriously damaged. When borders East of Vienna open and those in the West close, effectively bottling up refugees in Austria, the camp feeds, clothes, gives medical and psychological treatment, finds shelter for, and provides some much-needed human comfort to thousands of refugees daily. All achieved by volunteer help solicited via social media.

“Train of Hope gave me a lot of faith in humanity. It’s awesome to see what people can do just because they want to help. I don’t think this has happened like this before.” Ashley Winkler is one of the leaders of Train of Hope. She was active in various local demonstrations, and was also affected by her father’s charity work. “The first night that I spent here in the first week, there was a family here, 2 adults and 6 kids, and those kids were sick. I think that was the first real contact the volunteers here had with the refugees. The next morning the sun was rising, it was rather beautiful, I stood there and it was so clear to me that this needs to be done. People are needed here. There were more refugees coming in. I called my boss, “I’m sorry I can’t come in today, I could call in sick but I’m not sick, I’m at the main station and they need my help, and I need to be part of this.” He gave me the day off.”

The many refugee stories of life-threatening ocean crossings, gouging smugglers, police brutality, and local hostility from European citizens are relatively well-known. What is not so known is how people power actions like the Train of Hope operate, how they manage so rapidly to draw helpers to volunteer and donate often beyond what they can afford, and often from thousands of kilometers away. And how untrained volunteers as young as 16 are affected by being actively involved in the seemingly Sisyphean task of resolving this crisis that is stumping their parents’ generation and short-circuiting public institutions.

As Martina notes, “The Austrian Railway supported us from Day One, because they knew they didn’t have the infrastructure, the personnel, just a few security people. And we are here, we are volunteers, we have food, we have bottles of water. We tried to give them some other stuff, like doctors coming even as volunteers too.”

It was bone chilling cold when I returned to meet Lena, the camp’s resident psycho- therapist. She was knitting woolen caps for refugee children. We found a warm spot in the tent for the Samariterbund EMTs. “It was around the 6th of September when I started here, two or three days after they set up this camp. I saw a posting on Facebook, and called and asked if they needed a psycho-therapist, and they said, yes please! It was really chaotic. They just said, “OK, here’s a patient. You shout out for a translator, you shout out for a doctor, everything will be fine. And it was really working like that. We’re the fastest hospital all over the world” She smiles. “I felt a bit like a stewardess: Men go there, women there, and children over here. You got the flu? Or the man flu? The first day I stayed for twenty- eight hours straight through, next day my legs were saying “What the Fuck!!”

Something Ashley is very familiar with. “It’s an addiction. This doesn’t feel like a job. It feels like a purpose in life, so it’s easier to be here 24/7, and from Monday to Sunday, and do night shifts. I did a 52 hour shift when we had over 2000 refugees. At some point I wanted to leave, but then someone needed something and I stayed.”

The Train of Hope camp sits by the Guertel – the belt that encircles the inner districts of the city. The area, for years a rather ugly wasteland for the lower classes and immigrants, is being rapidly revitalised, ironically to prepare for a projected population growth of around 10% over the next decade. Half-built mini-skyscrapers, nondescript hotel chains, and glass and steel office buildings loom over the last remaining ugly post-war social project housing. The train station, a modernist dark steel behemoth completed last year, is the largest presence in the area. At the very end of the train station, the volunteer camp sticks on the hauptbahnhof like a last scrappy holdout before being swept away by gentrification.

Train of Hope looks in some ways exactly as one might imagine a camp on the edge of a war zone: a patchwork of tents storing donated food, medical and hygiene supplies, clothing, blankets, baby prams. You approach the camp with a steady stream of refugees, coming and going in buses, taxis, on foot. A refugee passes, poking a finger through the tattered shoe in his hand. A weary family exits a taxi, a baby asleep in its mother’s arms. Pairs of young men checking their phones. As you cross the main entrance, between a large open store of donated water and an ambulance from the Samariterbund, the surprisingly large scale of the camp hits you. And the comforting level of organisation. My friend had told me to go up to someone at the entrance wearing a yellow jacket, and she would direct me to the office where I could sign in as a volunteer. Within half an hour, I was registered in the computer database, my name was on a sticker with the time I arrived (a therapist would check on volunteers who might feel overwhelmed after a few hours), and I was passed on to someone who asked me if I had any particular skills, such as translation or medical background. Rather shamefaced I had to admit I had neither. She then directed me to one of the stations that needed the most help, which that night was the Hygiene section. I was not sure what that entailed, nor was I sure how long I would stay that evening, but I felt prepared to face my fears, roll up my sleeves and get stuck in.

Getting a sense of how the Train of hope operates is rather easy. Before I started my shift at the hygiene section I toured the camp, which has several distinct areas. The areas around and to either side of the main entrance are open to the elements. They include the storage tents, the deposit for donations arriving at all hours, the Samariterbund emergency medical station, the storage area for blankets ready for laundering, an area for cleaning kitchen utensils, a few portable toilets, one portable toilet with sinks, the Train of Hope container office, a few benches for volunteers to rest, a single fire hydrant for washing and getting kettle water, a large rubbish container removed twice daily, and a tent dedicated to sorting and distributing clothing, blankets and sleeping bags to incoming refugees. The covered parts are inside what were previously an OeBB storage area, a bicycle deposit office, and a long hall with entrances to platforms. The bicycle room is now the volunteer registration office with desks to sign in as a helper or therapist or doctor, and also some extra sleeping cots for stranded refugees. The storage area has been converted into a Lazarette – a functioning war zone medical station with an ultrasound, resuscitation paddles, and a rotating staff of volunteer doctors and nurses. The long hall is the main hub.

Entering the hall during the busier times is an intense experience. Threading through the crowds of anxious faces, past volunteers calmly pushing carts with refills, to the right are several stations with mostly young volunteers coping with a constant stream of refugees – two kitchens, a lawyer’s stand, a children’s area, a stand handing out sim cards, a prayer point. In between are the entrances, where families sleep, eat, or simply rest. To the left is a mobile phone charging station, a wall of information with various open wifi networks, and more resting and sleeping spaces around the escalators leading up to platforms where trains still arrive and depart. Children’s paintings decorate a wall above one of the resting

areas.

Lena laughs. “It’s funny here in a good way. Everyone says thank you so much. Not only the refugees but the helpers too. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I never heard the word thank you so much.”

When I started my shift at the hygiene station, I experienced this intensely satisfying interaction of shy thank yous, the need of the refugees to shake hands with us. And also some sense of ther shame at being in this position. I would soon learnt that noone behaves normally under these circumstances. I introduced myself to the girl wearing the section leader’s yellow jacket – a student at Vienna University – and to the others there. My name sticker was enough to identify me as separate me from the refugees and I stepped behind a wooden trestle table I would barely leave for the next 12 hours.

“It was really small when I came in the first week, and not as chaotic, or stressed, obviously cleaner. Everyone was so positive” I saw Marcus Richter first when he was on clean-up duty, pushing a trolley full of rubbish bag through the packed main hall. He stopped to play football with a young Syrian boy, using an old teddy bear. “It’s so overwhelming. You get so focused on your work, it just passes by, and then afterwards you sit at the train station, and like, woah, so much has happened.” His fresh, 22 year old face was a mix of youth and a great deal of weariness developed over this short space of time. “There was this woman the other day, she was standing there crying, and you can just give her a shoulder to cry on. You try your best, but I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

There is no typical day at Train of Hope. Or night. You simply do what is needed. You start in one area, then are drawn away when a refugee arrives and signals to his throat that he needs medical attention. On the way to the Lazarette, a volunteer needs help with a trolley full of freshly arrived donations. A refugee points to his phone. You help him find the wifi network with some difficulty – the screen is in Arabic. Several others need the same. A refugee with halting English or German needs to find his family or friends. Where is the shower, please? There are none, just the sinks or the fire hydrant, where feet are constantly being washed, teeth brushed, kettles filled. You pass the kitchen and they shout they need more bread or bananas. The hygiene table has run out of deodorant. You take on the task of finding them in the storage tent. More arrivals need medical attention. You search for a translator when hand signals don’t suffice. It’s a dizzying, adrenaline fueled rush of activity, and you feel good to be part of it.

Ashley summed up how almost every volunteer feels, especially when, in their few free moments, they interact with friends who are still organising parties or shopping trips or holidays. “A lot of people don’t get the situation. It’s like standing in front of a burning forest, and people are complaining about the ashes, but not doing anything to stop the fire. We’re trying to stop this fire. Or at least keep it under control, and help these people.” She grinned. “I think it’s the first time my father is really proud of me. My Mom is worried of course, but she’s a mom.”

During the slower periods, when the refugees are bused round the country for processing in the larger federal camps, or trains have not arrived, the volunteers remain in a constant state of preparation. Their easy manner with each other, the smiles and nods of encouragement, the cigarette and coffee breaks, all bely their underlying states of utter exhaustion. It’s hard to imagine how stressful that can be, especially for the many who stay well beyond any international recommendation for this type of work.

I chain smoked with Lena. “Everybody at the beginning was smiling all the time, just doing, doing. Nobody got tired. But I told them it’s like skiing – on the third day, something will happen. So, on that day I had to do some crisis management with the helpers, things like panic attacks. They were overloaded from all these things. Sometimes it is really too much for them. This is crisis management.”

Later that night, I trade texts with Nada, one of the early leaders. “Ok, after an interview with a therapist for you guys, I’m feeling so many things – frustration, anger, sadness, joy. A state I am sure u guys deal with everyday.” She replies, “Yes, that’s literally what we are dealing with every day! Aggression, fear, hope definitely go with that as well!”

I bumped into Martina again outside the office. There was some issue with the kitchens. “Someone brought us stress balls, you really need them!” Martina switched constantly between laughter and seriousness. “It started to get exhausting after about three weeks. Your body goes, like oh my God I don’t have energy anymore. You’re getting less sleep. And you have all the sickness around here. I could deal with that for the last four weeks and then you get a cold because there’s always a crowd around you, and they are all coming sick from everywhere, so you have to watch out. When you are on a stress level and your body is down you get everything. Disinfection is really important. We learned that two weeks ago.” Someone now goes around at regular intervals to every volunteer with a spray disinfectant and wipes.

Claudia, a therapist who recently lost her father still made it to a local hotel that night to hold a group therapy session with the volunteers. The Train organisers have regular meetings now in donated hotel rooms at the two hotels that loom over the camp – Motel One and the Star Inn. The Star Inn also allows the camp to get hot water to wash kitchen utensils. Volunteers hand carry heavy plastic tubs of hot water back and forth. Most hotels in the city have been either unwilling or unable to help beyond the basics. Vienna is a city of congresses. And the volunteers and refugees are not their ideal clients. Over time, they are coming around to their scrappy neighbour. Motel One offered a meeting the next morning to discuss what else they can do. Perhaps some rooms. Maybe some of their workers could volunteer?

The organisers have also developed strategies to keep the number of volunteers up. Too few, and the camp and its team would risk breaking down under the pressure. The flow of donations needs to be controlled or some refugees get everything and others nothing. Annie confirmed that the facebook posts and tweets calling for helpers or goods had proven inadequate. “A facebook post is too slow when we need people here in the next half hour or hour. We can now call people we know and they can be here much faster.” Ashley agreed.“It evolves all the time. We didn’t have the “Helfereinteilung” in the first two weeks. All these positions developed over time. We now get some tips from NGOs on how we could organise this, but it’s still mostly self-organised, and learning by doing, and seeing what needs to be done.”

What keeps everyone going is personally witnessing a daily evidence of humanity in a sea of depressing news feeds. Donations pass through the main entrance, where rotating volunteers help unload a steady stream of essential items from a cross-section of society. I worked this “security” shift on another day, starting around eleven in the morning, intending to stay just a few hours, but leaving after 7pm. The team I worked with that day included Maria, a jewelry designer from Prague. On Friday night, she decided her weekend would be better spent helping in Vienna, and took the 5hr journey the next morning. Melmet, A student, had taken several refugees in to her flat for hot meals and

showers. A young Swiss NGO worker paid his own way from Zurich and was sleeping rough for two weeks. An English doctor flew over in the first week and crashes on a cot in the Lazarette. Volunteers arrive to sign in. Refugees needing food and clothing are directed to the left. I do a double-take when a Christian band asks for a spot to play. A wide variety of cars pull up in the parking area. It becomes hard at times to still leave an emergency space for ambulances. Volunteers unload tents, prams, shoes. Many people bring exactly what is needed. People are reading the regular tweets sent out that list what is needed that day at every camp in the city.

Marcus passed by pushing another trolley of rubbish bags. He had had a massive fight with his Mother that morning. Instead of babysitting his little brother, he was off on the “S” convoy – another facebook initiative to bring clothes and food to a camp in Croatia.“A friend said if you don’t help you’re somehow less of a good citizen, which is not true. Everyone helps in the way they can. The initiative was at first from the people and not the city, and now the people have kind of dragged the politicians with them. It’s good, but I also found that sad for the government and the big NGOs who really struggled at the beginning.”

Around noon, a wave of refugees turn up from hundreds of shelters, private flats, police detention, processing places and the streets. It’s lunchtime. A five year old blonde girl passes me, humming, carrying some cucumbers. She joins her Austrian family, hard at work on a growing pile of sandwiches. They have given up their Sunday to supply the food lines. They are far from the only one. A group of young Scouts, the Pfadfinders, arrives to help in the makeshift kitchens, where the line of refugees is beginning to look endless. I slice cake next to two sixteen year olds. Their school has given their entire class 30 hours a week for the last three weeks to help at the camp. Hands-on global education. I hear a soft Mancunian accent. Ahmad and his mates from Manchester drove two white vans filled with hygiene articles, wellington boots, rain gear and other clothes across Europe. One of the vans broke down in Germany. The mechanic asked for 2500 to repair it, even though they would supply the part. I asked Ahmad how much the van was worth. A couple of hundred, he smiled ruefully. Several 20 year old couchsurfers from Georgia finish their 6hr shifts. A group of teens and their teachers turn up from a Chicago Catholic school to start theirs.

There is no hot food preparation at the camp, except for a french fry station set up by students between classes. You wonder where the new trendy street food truck operators are. Luckily, locals of all stripes have stepped up to the plate: A Vietnamese group turns up with trays of hot food and a team of helpers including the Vietnamese ambassador’s wife. They insist on staying to serve their food, which turns out to be problematic as the kitchens are at their busiest at that hour. I finally find them a spot. The Vietnamese decide that day they must encourage their community to become more actively involved. They are followed by a Muslim youth group with Halal dishes. Volunteers help to unload trays of dolmades and baklava from a shiny new Porsche Cayenne. A middle-aged couple hand over bags of hand-picked grapes from their vineyard. A burger restaurant brings food for the volunteers. Brick 5, an art and event space, delivers Thai curry, fruit and drinks. Foreigners arrive in cars or on foot from all over the world – America, Georgia, the UK, Germany, Croatia. Some Portuguese lads arrive with over 1000 euros they collected from their friends. A large group of Sikhs from a local temple place huge vats of delicious smelling lentil curry and rice on a trolley, a service they have provided every day for over 4 weeks.

I spoke Mehar Narinber Singh as he opened his van with a fresh delivery. “One of our

youngsters from our church here in Vienna came here and he saw they have no warm food at all. I came and saw it was a really terrible situation, especially with the women and children. They had no food, I don’t know for how many days. Here they only had some bread and butter, sandwiches. The next day we started, and we’ve been doing this for one and a half months now. Every day we cook and serve 100-150 kilos of rice, plus about 100 kilos of lentil curry. We work with the students. Everyone here is very friendly, everyone who comes is really helping.”

You cant help but be amazed how these kids can continue to do this, with no end in sight. “We are not going to stop it. Even yesterday, a guy said he had 100 people in Hietzing who had nothing to eat. So I said, no problem, take what you need. We are Sikh. We don’t care what religion anyone is. For us we are all human beings. We have our own donations in our Sikh community in Vienna. We have enough stock for two months. As long as we have, we will cook it and bring it from our temple. We will not stop, unless they will say “ok, now no more trains are coming, so you can go home”, then it’s a different story.”

After several weeks of this non-stop activity, there are more and more signs of stress among the volunteers. A young volunteer starts shouting and cycles away. Mixed in with the sense of purpose that drives them, and the pure satisfaction of taking time away from their normal teen and student lives for this historic humanitarian mission, there is the natural stress of any job. A stress that is compounded by language and cultural barriers, and some anxiety too. It’s extremely odd for both the volunteers and the refugees when the normal barriers of sex and class and culture are thrown out of the window but everyone has to cary on as if this is the new normal.

Lena and the other volunteer therapists and psychologists (at least one is always on duty) care for so many volunteers and refugees they often need therapy themselves. They do what they can in personal sessions, or with the medicine they have available in the Lazarette. Extreme cases have to be passed on to a hospital, but they almost always get sent back to the camp.

“I can speak with the girls who were raped alone if they can speak some English, otherwise I find a female translator. Sometimes we can bring in a psychiatrist if they are available. Some people want to commit suicide. A lot of the refugees who came from Hungary a few weeks ago were completely traumatised.” I asked Lena if she ever dealt with Muslims in her normal practice. She said almost never. She confirmed that the volunteers all required supervision to cope with such enormous challenges to the mind and body, including herself.

“My plan is to give two free therapy session per week in my practice. A lot of the volunteers are not fully traumatised, but they get over-loaded with everything, they are crying, crying, crying. They get panic attacks. They go without sleep for over 45 hours. Getting paranoid. Getting kind of schizophrenic. Some people forget their medicine at home but they want to stay helping so they don’t take their medicine. It’s my job to look in their eyes and tell them, “Go to bed. We need you on another day. If you have a burnout you can’t come back.”

A fight breaks out between a few of the men in the camp. It’s quickly controlled. It’s to be expected with so so many different ethnicities, women, men and children sleeping tightly packed on floors, many sick with flu, wearing ragged, mismatched clothing too thin for the increasingly cold weather. No one is immune to the many scary reports of riots at other camps, the questions from friends and family whether they might be serving some ISIS

members, the over 30% of Viennese who want to refuse entry to any refugees, the female refugees assaulted on the way to vastly over-populated bathrooms, the violent battles between refugees and well-armed police at border posts in Hungary. Many stories have proved to be fakes circulated by conservatives and the right wing. Who knows any more what is true or not, but what the volunteers see is real and immediate, not discussed abstractly in comfort far from their frontline.

Timna, a student studying music at Vienna university, had been at the camp for three weeks. “Definitely there were a few moments when it got too much for me. When there were refugees coming here (from Hungary) who were exhausted and also beaten up, totally bruised all over, some of them really bloody. That day I was already working four night shifts before that, and I was, like, ok, that’s too much, and I went home for three days to clear my head and I also talked with other people about it. You need to share it. Every experience that we’ve got here.” I asked her how she managed to return after what she dealt with? “Despite the fact that it was really awful what we all saw that day, there’s so much we get back from the refugees, this little smile they give you when you give them a toothbrush, or when you give them food. The way they look at it. It’s heaven for them. It’s incredible.”

What has been very disappointing for the Camp leaders is the stark reality that their hopeful mission is not immune to what Martina termed “criminal energy”. It’s not just hearing stories of Police in Hungary taking bribes from the smugglers, or the few Austrian taxi drivers charging exorbitant amounts to ferry refugees from camp to camp. “Some things were stolen from the office. It’s open to almost anybody. You have your bags there the whole day. Money was gone, mobiles gone. Some translators got a badge from us, and then they stole money from the refugees. They tell them “Give me two hundred euro and I will get you a ticket” and then they are gone. We want to do the best for them, and then you have assholes around. I can’t even imagine what do you think, what do you feel when you can do something like that?’

I asked Martina what keeps her going, even when feeling disappointed or frustrated. “There are a lot of good moments. That’s the reason I come almost every day. In the first two weeks having contact with people, bringing them to the trains, when the trains left for Germany. We kept in contact with some of the refugees who had helped us, translating for us when they stopped here for a few days. The first messages, like, Hey Matti! I’m in Dortmund! I’m in Frankfurt, or Munich, and pictures, and Oh God they made it, and it’s amazing! People you have a friendship with still, even on Facebook. We keep contact with them with messages like “How are You? Send pictures from your place. If you need help I have some friends around, maybe they can visit you.” It’s going on. It’s not just being here. It’s the whole story going on.”

Nadja bonded with two siblings who got separated from their parents. She had heard they had finally been moved from a camp that was more like a prison, with only security guards and no assistance, to one in Stuttgart which sounded far more promising. They could come and go form there. It was still miles from their parents in Dortmund, “The Law is siblings are not considered a family connection only parents and children, or husbands and wives.” Nadja looked finished, but she was checking her laptop for places she could stay in Stuttgart to visit the kids. She makes several trips to camps all over Europe. I asked her why. “So we can pass on the information to the refugees. They think Germany is going to be so different for them, but it’s not. Why don’t they stay here? We had a woman come, eight months pregant, with a newborn, and a downs child as well. She needed help. But her husband wanted her to go to Germany where there’s a sister. She would have ened up

in a camp with no help at all. We persuaded her to stay in Vienna. She wants to be independent, not to do what her husband tells her. We finally a place for her here in the city.”

I hit the wall several times during my night shift. But there was no going home. You simply could not leave your team to cope alone. The steady flow of refugees lasted the entire 12 hours. We hand out shaving kits, soaps, shampoos, deodorant – the basics to clean up on the road. Female refugees shyly sort through feminine hygiene products, baby powder, pampers. At 4am I have my own mini-breakdown. A young couple arrive with a newborn. They need baby milk. Between my hand signals, and an exhausted translator, we discover the baby is just three months old. I search desperately for some milk. It has to be exactly for newborns, but all I can find is powdered milk for toddlers. I scan the label of something that looks hopeful – it includes calcium. It needs to be made with 40 degree water, in three careful steps, but we have only the kettle at the tea and coffee station. I realise in that split- second how totally unprepared I am to be a father. I think I changed a nappy once in my life. I start to feel frustrated, angry. I’m living in one of the richest countries in the world and I can’t get baby milk when it’s urgently needed???! I calm myself, grab a baby bottle with measurements on the side, and rush to the coffee stand. We agree the kettle water is probably 100 degrees, so another volunteer finds a green plastic watering can and fills it with cold water from the fire hydrant. Hygiene is out of the window at this point. The girl at the stand adds the hot water to the powder, shakes it, forgetting the nipple at the top is open. We’re all sprayed with the milk. It’s somehow hilarious. She adds the rest of the water to the right mark, I set the bottle in the watering can, and rush back to the hygiene stand. I wonder if I will kill the baby. I give the mother the bottle and pantomine “hot!” The mother calmly squirts it on her arm, shrugs and pops the bottle in the baby’s mouth. I decide to stock up on baby milk. I go to the storage tent. I tell them I hope I don’t kill another baby tonight. The guys there turn the place upside down. Finally they find one small packet for newborns. And it’s not powder! We’re all overjoyed. The storage guy stops me, “Um, another baby?” Then he realises it was a joke.

I sat with Annie in the office as she read an online story in which the big DM chain were proudly announced new donations to a long list of groups. Train of Hope was not on the list. “What about us?!” She said exasperated. The supply problem is compounded by federal regulations that only allow government money to flow to recognised NGOs. Organisations like the Catholic Caritas, who manage the camp at the other main train station in Vienna, and the Protestant Diakonie – receive not only state and city funding, but also donations from the large supermarket chains, and major companies. They do not share any of their donations with train of Hope. So far only two chains have donated to them regularly – Oelz and Voeslauer. They have had to spend some of their donated money to make deals with local groceries to buy discounted fruit and vegetables.

Two weeks earlier, Train of Hope made themselves a Verein so they can get some of this money and essentials. They are finally able to deal directly with the Vienna City coordinator for refugees, Peter Hacker. They are also using a PR agency to raise their level of awareness. A third party set up an indiegogo campaign to raise 25,000 euros. Annie showed me the screen: 16,500 with 25 days to go.

“Being a Verein makes it easier for us on the legal side. Before that everyone made decisions and they were responsible for that. Now we’re all safer on the legal side. And it gives us a better stand point for authorities, politicians. This is something that is going to get bigger and last longer. Maybe not in Vienna. We have these scenarios in our heads, things that could happen. We would like to help somewhere else – we get a lot of calls

from places like Voraldeberg, Sweden, England, to help with the structure there. We could travel the world to give help where it’s needed.”

I’m at the camp one night just to fact check my story, when I receive a panicked call from a musician friend – Skye Kiss, who, with her musician husband Zoltan, had taken in a family of six refugees. The family were living in their rehearsal space. Skye had been helping to get them registered, find food for them, launder for them, with many serious dramas in between. The family were lost in the system for three days. Skye found them again in a police cell, frightened, the father and mother separated form their children and each other.

Now Skye told me the family and twenty others were stuck on a bus about to be sent to Graz, several hours away. They had had nothing to eat for drink or over 6 hours, including babies and toddlers. I told her I would find food and to come over right away to pick it up. I forgot about the new regulations – now each section has a clear leader, and clear rules as to the exact time everything must shut down. I run into a stressed out head of the cold kitchen section. She goes almost into a meltdown at the idea of reopening. I tell her it’s an emergency. She rushes to the office to complain. I finally get approval from Martina. I rush with several other employees to the food storage. Nelly Eisenreich, a sweet, always smiling 18yr old, jumps immediately into action. “Biscuits? Let’s see, how many do you think they need? Oh, just take the whole box.” We fill a supermarket trolley with prepackaged sandwiches, fruit, dates, milk, juice, water, hummus, bread. And Nelly’s carton of biscuits. Skye arrives a minute later. We load the car and Skye peels off into the night, on another rescue mission.

An offhanded comment from one of the leaders as we left the camp: the changes feel sometimes like they are at the expense of actually helping. I asked Lena her how Train of Hope can maintain the free spirit that started it almost two months ago. “At the beginning it was chaotic. But now we have coordinators for the volunteers, for food, for clothes, for nearly everything. We use walkie-talkies and can call for something. But with more bureaucracy and hierarchy comes its own set of issues, and they need help to manage that. I am more important than you because I have this jacket or badge. They are stressed with it, with each other. Some people can organise their resources. For the rest, I tell them you need to sleep, you need to take vitamins, which we also give.”

As freezing weather sets in, and University starts again, there is a drop off in volunteers. Damp fog seeps into the blankets and clothing. It’s hard to work in the clothes distribution tent. The mismatched donated clothes make the refugees look exactly like refugees. Proud men awkwardly ask a female student to help them find the right pair of underpants or socks. The storage is out of long thermal underwear, out of gloves. The office sends out facebook posts and tweets. Gloves appear within the hour. Still not enough for the hopeful, waiting, silent line.

For Mehar and his Sikh Temple volunteers, and for everyone else at the camp, the experience has built bridges between people who would normally never meet, never think they could share anything in common. Mehar felt more Viennese from the experience, a sentiment echoed by Martina. “We went with our Train of Hope family to the big demonstration to support refugees, and we talked about how we are sure we would never get to know each other if we just met on the street somewhere because we are really so different. We are really good friends now but this would never happen except here. Just here.”

“One of the Syrian translators told me he has been in Vienna for 5 years now, seeking

asylum, and he told me he met so nice people here, more friends in one month than he made in 5 years. He said “Before this I could name only 3 friends. And now you are all my family now.” It’s amazing!”

Martti laughs. “Even I feel more Viennese now. You don’t have to come from Syria or somewhere. They always tell me you are lucky here, you have a passport, and I say, no, I don’t! It’s even a kind of German integration. Thank you!” Lena agrees. “I really don’t know how this could have happened, but it did. I’m from Germany, and most of the time I said I don’t like Vienna, I want to go back, I don’t like the arrogant people here. But at the moment I’m really proud, because they arranged so much. When I look to other countries, I think, that’s sad, or stupid.”

For Ashley, previously working as a graphic designer for advertising, this has been a life- changing experience. “I think this is a breaking point in my life. I’ll be thirty in two years, and I always thought I knew what I wanted to do, and now it’s changing. And I want to stay in this business, if you want to call it a business. I call it a way of life. I want to help people, I want to be someone who can make a change even if it’s just a little bit. I want to be part of something bigger. I want to be part of the bigger picture.”

I asked Lena for her recommendations for a therapist who might be thinking of doing this. “Stay calm. I had to resuscitate a volunteer who had a heart attack. We have the paddles here. That was stressful. We had a near birth, we thought the volunteers would have to deliver it. Sometimes a psychologist will come in stressed with a patient, saying he’s crying, he urgently needs medicine! And I take him or her, and in 20 minutes he’s resting. A lot of translators are refugees so the history overwhelms them. They are crying and that’s okay. They can cry. It’s not necessary to bring them into the hospital when they cry. It’s helpful to cry. Sometimes I watch the news and I’m crying too sometimes. The important thing here is, whatever happens, don’t panic. Stay cool. You have three people in one room who want to commit suicide? Stay Cool.”

I wondered if Lena had a sense of how this might affect the volunteers when this is finally over. “Maybe I don’t have enough time to process it all yet. I’m just doing it.”

When I first spoke with Ashley, the elections were still a few days away. She noted everyone at the camp was extremely worried about the very real possibility of a large win for the FPO. The party’s posters were relentlessly exploiting local fears of the refugees in the city. “We hope the right wing party doesn’t overwhelm us all. There’s a German saying: What the farmer doesn’t know, he doesn’t eat. So we try to reason with the locals here, and show the that these people are not just a big unknown evil mass. They’re not. They’re people who’ve been through hell. No one’s leaving their country because it’s a fu activity for a Sunday afternoon. A bomb hit their home and they had to get the pieces of their baby out of the ashes, just to have something to bury. They had to leave behind everything they had. It’s not because it’s better for them here or in Germany. It was the only way they could survive. People should know more about every story that’s happening here, and then they will understand.”

Nine weeks later, when a typically freezing Viennese Winter has set in, and university is back in session, the camp is suffering: Volunteer numbers have dropped drastically. They have had to outsource clothes sorting. They paid for new, more official stickers with their logo to avoid the criminal issues from the first weeks. A deal to accept funding of 150,000 euros from the politically opposed Interior Ministry, headed by Johanna Miki-Leitner, who had infamously called for fences around Europe after visiting the camp in Spielefeld,

caused internal divisions – many of the original team left in protest. They had to move the Lazarette into a small container, apparently to safeguard their drugs store at night. The camp has also been beset by a few upsetting incidents: children have been abducted. A source told me a group were taken from the former children’s corner in the main hall by an unidentified woman.

On the positive side, a new large, safe children’s corner is visited by a group of clowns. More local bands are playing the camp. The government’s director for refugee affairs, Thomas Trattner, announced at a conference for all the NGOs at the Arbeiter Kammer that Vienna would take in 10,000 refugees, without condition, all with basic insurance. The family of six taken in by my friends Skye and Zoltan Kiss finally got a home. Across Austria, tiny village voted to accept refugees. And Nelly, Ashley and many of the others I spoke with are still at the camp, night and day.

And then Paris. The mysterious passport. New bombing campaigns by Western countries, in particular France, on Syrian cities. Friends and families deleting one another after reading posts they disagree fundamentally with on social media. It feels like New York City after 9/11. The word Hope seems even more isolated out there at the little camp on the Guertel.

Leaving the camp on a misty morning, I merge with the commuters rushing to work. It’s hard not to feel special somehow, part of a ragtag volunteer army who by some miracle are effectively coping with the results of so many global conflicts. The election is over now, and the far right FPO, although still frighteningly strong in Vienna, did not win the mayor’s seat. Their cynical simplistic posters still blanketed the city after the election: One for All, All for One. With Love from Vienna. The irony is so apparent. The Train of Hope is living proof of what happens when everyone is truly there for one another. When Love triumphs over War.